August 2007 Entries
Last time saw us discover that, once again, we are pawns in a Great Game, and with the intervention of a group of godlike beings known as 'Envoys', we have been directed to seek out The Oracle, who will guide us on the path to becoming 'Weh no Su', or 'Closer to the Stars'. This path to mystical enlightenment is the first step toward us being able to meet our nemesis, Shiro Tagachi, on anything like even terms. At the moment, he's cheating quite a lot, raising armies of mutated dead, being rather too good with the old twin daggers,...
Bit of a lazy three-day weekend here, and yet again, not much MMO to ramble about. I find myself in a bit of a 'calm before the storm' at the moment. Done with free trials for now, and yet with the exception of Guild Wars and Second Life, (both free to play) not really obsessed with any of the more traditional MMOs at present. Mostly, I feel like I'm waiting. For what, I'm not quite sure - probably whichever out of Tabula Rasa or Pirates of the Burning Sea gets here first. I hope it's Pirates, mostly because I've finally...
Seems my Internet troubles are all better now, and last night saw an uninterrupted Guild Wars: Factions session, where we managed to make up for all the lost progress of Tuesday. This week sees a new addition to the Tuesday N00b Club, in the form of a Ranger/Warrior with some rather unorthodox ideas about Melee Axemanship which I was initially dubious about, but which seemed to be working quite well as it turned out. I don't know a lot about Warriors, per se, never having seriously given one a go for any real length of time, but being a Ranger...
Don't mind me - I'm still seething. Not much to report on the MMO Obsession front lately, although not for want of trying at least. An almost conspiracy-like combination of technical troubles serving to keep me mostly offline since last week; ISP troubles, server troubles, network issues, and somewhat bizarrely, some Friend of Humanity having at the Internet with a twelve-bore, and being successful enough to stop me getting anything useful done in any online game for the majority of Monday night. Living in the UK, as I do, I'm largely oblivious to the whole nest of vipers that...
Apparently, there are other things to do on the Internet than play Guild Wars: Factions, it seems. Normally I have several different little things on the go at once, but to be honest, right now it's just various campaigns in Guild Wars, and my usual low-grade minor tinkering in Second Life at the moment. For those who are interested, (and not many are), I'm currently spending my time in there seeing what I can do with these interesting and well detailed solar system planetary survey textures, with vague ideas about creating some kind of working orrery. Purely a fun...
Guild Wars: Factions continues, and this time saw us picking up with the investigation of a sudden outbreak of a quite horrific plague on the island of Shing Jea. While the early symptoms seem to consist mostly of an irrational bloodlust, causing the afflicted to attack former friends and allies with impunity, the more advanced cases are something else again. As we joined up with a group of Master Togo's more advanced students in the Jaya Bluffs and Haiju Lagoon, further isolated outbreaks required our investigation, and subsequent cleansing, and many nasty symptoms became apparent, including wholesale mutation of...
Wahey! Super lightning bonus Cheapseat here! Well, kind of. Basically, I was sat staring at the PlayNC online store thingey, brooding with indecision about which flavour of City of Heroes to actually go for; US or EU, and got a bit distracted, as I do. I'm still none the wiser in the regard by the way. All the cool people I met during my free trial CoH stint seem to actually play on US servers, despite most of them being on the Olde Worlde side of the Pond, like me. On the otherhand, it's always helpful to be playing...
Thanks to some kind of network implosion at Arenanet Towers, they had another go at the Dragon Festival this weekend, and I happened to be online during a large part of it over Sunday afternoon.
I was actually out alone with my original Prophecies Ranger, making a start on the Nightfall stuff with that character, following along behind in the Mesmer's wake, and joining the outpost dots, partly to grind out some cash for the somewhat costly set of end-game threads for said Mesmer, and partly to get another go at the various Treasure spawns. I'm happy enough with my...
And so back to Guild Wars, and a whole new adventure! This time, we're having a go at Guild Wars: Factions, an earlier offering than Nightfall, which I'd completely missed at the time. I'm rubbish at keeping up with what's new, in general, and tend to end up banging on about all manner of interesting thing that everyone else has already played to death. I don't mind though; on the plus side, by the time I get there, these games are usually quite comprehensively balanced, fixed, patched and smooth. I went and bought the thing at a real...
Well, that's probably enough free trial hopping for the time being, I'd say. Been an interesting month and a half though, and it's always good to broaden one's horizons, even if it is only 'trying a different kind of computer game for a bit'. I quite enjoy the occassional change of scenery from time to time anyway, and tend to be a bit of a fickle with my Brand Loyalty to be honest, but this particular mini-run of Operation Cheapseats did have a kind of focus to it: looking for a 'different' MMO.
I'm sure the more perceptive of you have...
Once more unto the breach, dear friends! A slightly shorter free trial then usual this time with Turbine's Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach, a modern day PC-based incarnation of the pen-and-paper game that started it all off, over 30 years ago. The free trial is available here: http://trial.ddo.com/ It lasts ten days, rather than the more customary fourteen, weighs in at about 2GB, and involves a bit of wrangling with File Planet, and quite a bit of patching once it's down, which makes for a bit more of a chore than most. It needs no credit card, only a valid...
Well, even after all my years of MMO familiarity, and even perhaps complacency, it turns out that I'm still not so 'veteran' that reading the instructions isn't on occasion helpful. After a somewhat difficult Dungeons and Dragons Online jaunt as a Rogue, which mostly made me confused, irritable and surlier than is seemly, I hit the character creation screen once more. Stung a little out of my umbrage by an insight that perhaps had not occurred to me, by Commenter Jimmy previous, I thought I'd give a melee class a go, precisely to see what life is like on...
In the far north of the canyon lands of Vabbi, the great river leaves the mountains and springs of remote and unknown uplands and pours down various cataracts, continuing, as it ever has, to carve it's relentless way through the ravines of Vabbi, before widening and slowing, and delivering it's stolen fertility to the lowlands and flood plains of distant Kourna to the south, and the seas around the isles of Istan.
But here, at the Holdings of Chokhin, the river is mighty, powerful, driven by rains, made vigorous by the tight and steep channels it has carved for itself over...